Inside Pee-wee's Playhouse

by Caseen Gaines

  “The doll was never produced,” Young recalls, “because the marketing department at Matchbox felt that since she didn’t interact with any of the other Pee-wee characters, she was not viable as a toy.”

  Timothy Young’s design and prototype for the unreleased Penny doll [© Timothy Young]

  Young’s prototype was an 18-inch doll, crafted similarly to the talking Pee-wee Herman.

  The head was made of a thick plastic, attached to a bendable plush body wearing Penny’s signature blue dress. If released, Penny would have said several phrases and presumably would have been pull-string operated.

  Reubens had other ideas that stalled before reaching the prototyping phase. One was a line of Miss Yvonne wigs and makeup; another was that he would market colognes (Pee-wee Number Five and Eau de Pee-wee), but Reubens had a hard time drumming up interest in them.

  “Nobody wanted to do the wigs,” he says. “I thought it would have been really funny for little girls to be going to school with these huge wigs on.”

  One other unreleased project very nearly made it to stores: Purina brand Pee-wee Chow, breakfast cereal intended for kids to eat on their hands and knees. The cereal made it all the way to a blind taste test — kids overwhelmingly hated it.

  “The company wanted to go back to the drawing board, but it would have been so time consuming that I didn’t want to do it,” Reubens says.

  Although some projects didn’t materialize, there was enough merchandising to keep Reubens busy when he wasn’t on the set. At a time when children’s television was under fire for being too merchandise-driven, Judy Price was relieved to see that Reubens’ approach was free of criticism from parent advocacy groups.

  “Pee-wee’s Playhouse was more the exception than the rule in regards to merchandising,” she says. “In the 1980s, a lot of shows were actually based on toys. The toy came first and then the show. There was no merchandising out during the Playhouse’s first year. Paul missed the bandwagon partially because he was too much of a perfectionist. He didn’t want the merchandise to wag the dog. He wanted to do a show, and do a good show, and then the merchandising would follow.”

  Fan Dennis Manochio with his collection of Pee-wee memorabilia [© Dennis Manochio]

  Back to the Circus

  Unlike the show’s first awkward year, the second season shoot was relatively smooth sailing. The shows came in on time and within budget.

  “It’s a matter of personal pride for me that we weren’t wasting a lot of time,” says Wayne Orr. “I got two hundred pages of storyboards and they gave me the idea of what to do. I was very confident while I was shooting that everything would work, and it did.”

  In addition to the rigorous workload of writing, producing, starring in, and codirecting episodes, Reubens also made time to meet with terminally ill children whose dying wish was to meet Pee-wee Herman.

  Pee-wee takes a break to visit a young fan [© John Duke Kisch / CBS]

  “Paul always had time for kids,” Orr says. “He was nice to everybody, but to kids he was an absolutely nice host. He would be Pee-wee most of the time, a very calm Pee-wee, and would show them around the set. He deserves real kudos for that.”

  The second season of Pee-wee’s Playhouse was an overwhelming success. The show finished first in its timeslot, cementing its position as the dominating children’s television program on Saturday morning. That year, the show was nominated for 13 Emmy Awards, more than any other children’s television show has ever been nominated for in one year, with the exception of Sesame Street. The show took home three awards, for Outstanding Art Direction/Set Direction/Scenic Design, Outstanding Achievement in Makeup, and Outstanding Achievement in Videotape Editing.

  While working on the show’s second season, Reubens and McGrath continued working on Big Top Pee-wee.

  “We really started from scratch, screening a lot of circus movies on the Paramount lot, and kicking ideas around before we pitched it to the head of Paramount,” McGrath recalls. “The pre-writing period was longer than the writing.”

  The head of Paramount green-lit the picture and signed Grease director Randal Kleiser as director, and preproduction officially began. Although Kleiser was enthusiastic about the project, his sensibilities might not have been a perfect fit for a Pee-wee film.

  “Randal is a nice guy and he’s pretty talented,” says Richard Abramson, who was an executive producer on the film. “But he’s not Tim Burton. He just really wanted to work on the project and campaigned until he got it.”

  The process of working on both a hit television show and a major motion picture may have stretched Reubens too far.

  “It was really annoying when he was working on the movie because he definitely was distracted by the movie,” Prudence Fenton recalls. “The movie seemed to be cooler and more glamorous than a little TV show, but he worked it out.”

  Paul Reubens taking a break from working [© George McGrath]

  Reubens and McGrath headed to Hawaii to write the script at Kleiser’s home. While the duo worked excellently together, McGrath harbored concerns about some of Reubens’ choices.

  “The only thing that Paul definitely wanted to be in the script had very little to do with the circus,” McGrath recalls. “He wanted the longest screen kiss in movie history. I think he wanted it to be the answer to a trivia question.”

  Even before the film’s release, an extended kiss, shared with the 21-year-old actress Valeria Golino in her first American film, confused critics and polarized the public. Decades after the film’s release, it remains impossible to mention Big Top Pee-wee without talking about the kiss heard ’round the world.

  “This kiss, unbelievable,” Golino told the Los Angeles Times in a 1988 interview. “To me, it’s one of my favorite scenes because it goes on so long that it will for sure get a reaction out of the public.”

  That proved to be a gross understatement. Paramount began publicizing the kiss as a three-minute-sixteen-second epic a month before the film’s release, declaring that it was going to unseat the lip-lock between Jane Wyman and Regis Tommey in the 1941 film You’re in the Army Now, which clocked in at three minutes, five seconds. Curiously, the kiss was edited down to less than two minutes long and never achieved the milestone that Reubens sought.

  Gina (Valeria Golino) and Pee-wee Herman [Courtesy Paramount Picture / PhotoFest © Paramount Pictures]

  In the run-up to the film’s release, Reubens talked up the movie’s romantic subplots.

  “I’ve got an active libido in the new picture,” Reubens said, in character. “In Big Adventure I was obsessed with an object. In Big Top, I’m obsessed with love.”

  Of course, for a character who famously described himself as a loner and rebel, an obsession with love struck many as an ill-conceived character choice.

  “It was a big misjudgment, as far as I was concerned,” McGrath recalls.

  “When you’re working on a movie, it’s always great while you’re working on it,” explains Scott Chester, who was an associate producer on the film as well as Paul’s personal assistant. “I was so involved on day-to-day production that when we were doing the circus scenes and watching the hippo chase a pig down the hill, it looked like it had all those great Pee-wee elements. However, there was a point when I was watching him fall in love and having that long kiss and I just stopped in my tracks out of confusion.”

  Critics and audiences cited the film as evidence that Reubens was attempting to mature the Pee-wee Herman character, an observation McGrath disagrees with.

  “I’m not sure it was decided that Pee-wee would grow up,” McGrath says. “I don’t think he was really grown up. In Big Adventure he was dealing with Dottie, but this movie just took it a little further. I never really thought of his ‘growing up’ being a step the movie took, and I’m pretty sure Paul didn’t either.”

  Pee-wee with Winnie (Penelope Ann Miller
) in Big Top Pee-wee [Courtesy Paramount Pictures / PhotoFest © Paramount Pictures]

  While McGrath’s statement has merit, it ignores significant differences between Pee-wee’s relationships in the two films. In Big Adventure, Pee-wee has an obvious aversion to a romantic relationship with Dottie, the tomboy played by E.G. Daily, who works at the shop that services his bike. Despite her repeated attempts to get him to like her, he puts on a faux machismo act and ignores her advances. By the end of the movie, the duo has some sort of strengthened relationship, but it is left ambiguous as to whether or not their connection is romantic.

  However, when Big Top starts, Pee-wee is engaged to schoolteacher Winnie, played by Penelope Ann Miller, with whom he publicly displays affection in front of kindergarteners. The character then falls in love with Gina, the Golino character, and has an affair. There is even a suggested sex scene with a montage of cinematic clichés including images of volcanoes erupting and a train entering a tunnel.

  The true failure of the kiss isn’t simply that its adulterous nature might have offended some parents, but that to the majority of children in the audience, the romantic elements were simply disinteresting at best, disgusting at worse. Most children cover their eyes or recoil when their parents share a moment of intimacy; Pee-wee Herman was someone they saw as their developmental equal.

  Since the character’s inception, Pee-wee Herman has always walked a tightrope balanced between man and child, generous and self-centered, masculine and feminine. Although he famously asked, “I know you are, but what am I,” most people preferred the question to remain rhetorical.

  Surprisingly, Reubens’ view of the purpose of the kiss was similar to that of the critics. In fact, he has stated in interviews that he had intended to continue to mature the character. Although Big Top Pee-wee may have seemed to signal a new beginning in the character’s cinematic career, perhaps the actor in the red bow tie saw it as the first step in an exit plan.

  The Bearded Lady Sings

  [Courtesy Paramount Pictures / PhotoFest © Paramount Pictures]

  Paramount launched a full-on publicity offensive for Big Top Pee-wee in the summer of 1988. Several press releases were sent out updating journalists on the film’s progress, and Reubens was made available for in-character interviews to talk up the film’s prospects. Despite the level of access granted to reporters, few seemed enthusiastic about Pee-wee Herman’s latest adventure. Many wondered publicly how the character could survive a film with a romantic subplot, whether the film would repeat the box office success of Adventure, and how Pee-wee would function in a circus environment. Some reporters even expressed frustration with being forced to interview only Pee-wee Herman, while Reubens was allegedly “unavailable for comment.”

  “Entertainment writers are always informed that Pee-wee Herman will be interviewed as Pee-wee Herman, the film and television star, not as Paul Reubens, his real-life identity,” Associated Press reporter Bob Thomas wrote in a 1988 article. “How do you deal with that? Would you interview Lucille Ball as Lucy Ricardo? Sean Connery as James Bond? How to question Pee-wee Herman? In squeaks and baby talk?”

  Despite the less-than-favorable advance press the film received, Reubens remained optimistic that Big Top would find an audience and repeat the success of his original film — that is, until the film’s star-studded premiere. After the film rolled, and stars like Penelope Ann Miller and Kris Kristofferson started working the crowd, Reubens approached McGrath to talk.

  “Paul sat down next to me and said, ‘Well, you know the film is a bomb, right?’” McGrath remembers. “He explained that he could tell from the way people were talking to him at the party, not that anyone said anything bad about the film per se, but their remarks indicated they didn’t like it as much as the first film.”

  Big Top Pee-wee hit theaters July 22, 1988, to heavy publicity and minimal box office returns. The film made $15.1 million at the domestic box office, just over a third of Big Adventure’s overall haul. It was an undeniable misstep.

  [Courtesy Paramount Pictures / PhotoFest © Paramount Pictures]

  “I wasn’t pleased with the film,” McGrath says. “Paul’s insistence on having Italians cast in any role that had an Italian last name was a mistake; so much of what was funny in the script was barely understandable in their hands. But the worst miscasting was of the elderly townspeople. They were supposed to be Margaret Hamilton–type villains and could have been cast with younger character actresses like Suzanne Kent and Lynne Stewart. Instead, they cast a lot of very sympathetic-looking, really old women who always seemed to be victims. You ended up hating Pee-wee for being mean to them instead of vice versa.”

  According to associate producer Scott Chester, the casting was not the only facet of the film’s production where Reubens was steadfast in seeing his vision through. The actor had unprecedented creative control, overseeing all aspects of the shoot.

  “Paul had a lot more autonomy on the second film,” Chester says. “It was different when we were at Warner Brothers and he hadn’t made a film. They weren’t yes-men on the first movie, let’s put it that way.”

  “He’s extraordinarily talented, but he’s not great at everything,” Richard Abramson says. “He’s not great at managing people. He’s great at playing the character, but when he has total control and there’s no collaboration, he isn’t at his best.”

  Judy Price believes the film’s lackluster performance at the box office may have been due to Pee-wee’s television success.

  “The one thing I thought the movie did wrong was give Pee-wee an age,” she says. “Children didn’t see him as an adult. This is born out by research that was done way back in the early days of the television show. If you were eight years old, you viewed him as eight. In Big Top Pee-wee, he had romantic involvement and that aged him.”

  Richard Abramson agrees.

  “Besides the fact that the second movie was a piece of shit, I think the success of the Playhouse made the second movie do as poorly as it did,” he says. “For the first movie, Pee-wee’s target audience was college kids. After having an enormously successful [children’s] television show, it was harder for college kids to publicly support a character that their younger brothers and sisters were fond of. They might have watched privately in their dorm rooms, but that’s a different thing from having to declare you’re a Pee-wee fan at a ticket booth.”

  Although Reubens was devastated by the audience reaction to the film, there was no blowback from CBS — Big Top’s performance would not affect Playhouse.

  “I was surprised the second movie didn’t do as well as the first,” Price recalls. “But there honestly was never a concern about it at the network. In fact, any movie release usually enhances the awareness of a character and/or property, even with a lackluster box office, especially with the additional promotion. Of course, a blockbuster movie is even better.”

  The commercial failure of Big Top Pee-wee caused Paramount to terminate the development deal, killing plans for a gangster film Reubens had hoped to work on next.

  “Paul has always wanted to do a Pee-wee Confidential film,” McGrath recalls. “He and I spoke about it several times. There would be ’50s-style blaring horns and Pee-wee would be involved in the seedy side of the city. I think it would have been a funny movie.”

  Instead, Pee-wee returned to Saturday morning, putting Reubens’ career goals of being a movie star on hold for a second time.

  4: A Christmas Story

  By the fall of 1988, Pee-wee’s Playhouse was undeniably the most successful and well-thought-of children’s show on television. Merchandise was flying off toy store shelves, Pee-wee Herman had become one of the most recognizable public figures in America, and colleges across the country were beginning to use the show as an instructional aid in art classes.

  [© Sarah Llewllyn]

  Although Reubens was eager to return to work, an unexpected roadb
lock met him at the playhouse door. The Writers Guild of America (WGA) had a strike, and production on the show’s third season was delayed due to a lack of scripts. Ultimately, only two episodes were produced for the show’s third season. Both were written by John Paragon, who had since reconciled his differences with Reubens and returned to being a pivotal member of the show’s creative team.

  With the Writers Guild strike paralyzing the show for most of its third season, network executives at CBS were determined to come up with a way to compensate for the loss, while also tapping into the show’s adult fan base. Soon after Reubens’ promotional tour for Big Top Pee-wee, CBS executives approached executive producer Steve Binder with an idea.

  “CBS came to me and they said, ‘We have such a huge college market for the show,’” Binder recalls. “‘Do you think you can deliver a primetime special?’ And so Paul and I decided we would go for it.”

  The network had been toying with the idea of putting the show on in prime time ever since its first season. A 1986 Newsday article cites sources at CBS as saying that the network was considering running Playhouse twice a week before Late Night with David Letterman. Richard Abramson lobbied in vain for Playhouse to be broadcast at a time more accessible to adults.

  “I tried to convince CBS to run the show Friday night at midnight, but they didn’t see the value in it,” he explains. “I was trying to maintain some sort of connection with the college kid audience. Luckily, they ended up finding the show anyway, staying up all night drinking on Fridays and watching the show buzzed Saturday morning.”